Defence diplomacy: a primer

Defence diplomacy is a key tool of statecraft that embodies a combination of hard and soft power tools in furthering a state’s foreign policy agenda. In spite of this inherent value, defence diplomacy has remained a relatively understudied concept, primarily due to conceptual ambiguity and imprecisions that have often undermined analytical depth and comprehensive studies of its contours in practice.

In this episode, we focus on defence diplomacy, unravelling its meaning(s), its positioning in relation to other tools of statecraft. More specifically, we examine South Africa’s defence diplomacy in service of delivering strategic imperatives and foreign and security policy objectives